I have an open source software project called Imbo that I have hooked up to Travis-CI for testing of pull requests and pushes on GitHub. I recently came across an issue that made some tests fail on Travis-CI that passed on all other machines I run tests on. The issue seemed to be because of an old version of ImageMagick (6.6.9-7). Travis-CI use this version since they base their VM’s on Ubuntu-12.04-LTS, and that version of ImageMagick is the one currently available on 12.04.

I solved it by compiling my own version of ImageMagick via the .travis.yml file:

This made the tests pass, but the build went from taking about 2 minutes to 10, so it was not really a good fix. After asking around on the #travis-ci channel on IRC (freenode) @henrikhodne said that they might upgrade the package if they found a decent PPA. I looked around myself and found a PPA for Ubuntu-12.04 that had a newer version of ImageMagick available, so I decided to try and use that instead of compiling my own to see if that might speed up the build. I replaced the above snippet with the following in the .travis.yml file:

Some of you might know that I have a library for encoding PHP variables to their BitTorrent counterparts, and back to PHP, called PHP BitTorrent. Some days back I pushed another library to GitHub, namely a standalone BitTorrent tracker.

The tracker is pretty extensible and comes with a couple of back end implementations for you to choose from, the default being MongoDB. The tracker is not a complete tracker system with user authentication and torrent downloads and such, but a standalone “announcer” (like for instance the official BitTorrent tracker: bttrack). PHP BitTorrent Tracker can easily be extended to do user statistics and so forth though. An event listener doing this is shipped with the package.

More information (installation, configuration and more) is available at the project page on GitHub. Feel free to play around with it, and please use the issue tracker at GitHub if you find any issues. Happy torrenting!

I host my open source projects over at GitHub, and most of them do notifications to IRC on different events. Recently I saw that imbo/imbo and imbo/imboclient-php did not notify new pull requests and new issues in the issue tracker to IRC. These options are not visible in the admin GUI of the hook either. You can however use the API to enable these events.

The other day I released the first version of a small Open Source (MIT) PHP library that can be used to fetch system information; like for instance CPU usage, load average and memory usage (amongst other information). The library is available at GitHub and can be installed using composer (support for PEAR and phar will be added later).

During my Christmas vacation I received a pull request on GitHub for my PHP_BitTorrent project which added proper namespaces to the classes. I decided to merge the pull request and do some other changes as well. I removed the static methods and added instance methods instead which, IMHO, makes the API cleaner, and more important, made the code easier to test.

I have also done some more work on the BitTorrent tracker part of the project which is available in a separate branch (not a part of the 0.2.0 release). Feel free to play around with it and don’t hesitate to send me a pull request if you have improvements for it.